News and Announcements

SEA Connect - Entrepreneurs Sharing Session

Monk's Hill Ventures invites you to our quarterly SEA Connect event series, co-hosted by our friends at Block71SF. Join our entrepreneurs sharing session as they share some success stories & challenges from their startup journey and gain insights from their experience! Stay for the networking session that takes place afterwards and connect with fellow tech enthusiasts in the area.

Heads up! The Consulate-General of San Francisco has just sent email invitations for Singapore's 52nd National Day Celebrations. Invites are sent to those who have registered with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You may do so at: https://eregister.mfa.gov.sg/.

Please find attached an invitation from the Institute of Policy Studies at NUS to participate in their study on overseas Singaporeans.

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Take part in the IPS Social Lab’s Survey on Overseas Singaporeans!

For every 15 Singaporeans in Singapore, one more citizen lives abroad. The IPS Social Lab, a survey research unit at the National University of Singapore, wants to understand the motivations and experiences of Overseas Singaporeans. We are currently conducting an online survey till 30 September 2017.

If you are a Singapore citizen aged between 18 and 64 (both ages inclusive), have been living overseas for at least six months as of 12 May 2017, and are not currently a government employee or on a government scholarship, please sign up to take part in the survey here:

This project is supported by the Overseas Singaporean Unit, a division of the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth. Your responses are important as survey findings will provide policymakers with relevant and useful insights about our growing Singaporean diaspora. We intend to share the main conclusions of our findings publicly as well and hope that this will contribute to discourse on how Singapore can better support our overseas Singaporeans and maintain our links with them even while they’re away. Read more about our survey in a Straits Times article from 16/5/17: http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/study-to-find-out-mindsets-of-overseas-singaporeans

Know other overseas Singaporeans? Please do forward this e-mail to them.

If you have children below the age of 12, come join us for an afternoon of delightful storytelling, sing-along and craft with Singaporean writer Gwen Lee. It will be a splendid opportunity for your children to get (re)acquainted with Singaporean culture, food and heritage. Follow Gwen as she takes your children through her collection of Singapore Nursery Rhymes and a very special book to celebrate Mother's Day. They will be regaled by stories of colourful pasar malams to the charm of kampong living while making new friends with children of fellow Singaporeans here in the San Francisco Bay Area. We’ll cap the event with a spread of Singaporean kuehs and afternoon delights that will conjure special memories of home for you. So bundle your kids up in your SUV and join us in Santa Clara for a Saturday afternoon down memory lane! Another occasion to meet fellow Singaporean families here in the Bay Area.

About Gwen Lee
Gwen Lee (www.gwen-lee.com) currently lives with her family in San Jose. She is the author of six books, including There Was a Peranakan Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, The Adventure of Greco and Beco,and Little Cloud Wants Snow! A recommended book for the Read! Singapore Festival 2014, Little Cloud Wants Snow! has been translated to Korean and Mandarin, and is being used by schools in Texas, USA, to educate children about weather science.

All successful registrants will receive an email confirmation that your place has been reserved. To allow more children to attend the event, priority will be given to children and their parents. Grandparents and nannies/helpers will only be admitted subject to availability of places closer to the event.

Join us for a casual evening and spend time with a successful Singaporean start-up co-founder!

We're excited to have co-founder of Carousell, Quek Siu Rei with us for a casual and intimate sharing session as he looks back on his start-up experience; What were some of his biggest regrets? What would he have done differently? What advice would he give to his former self? How exactly did he embark on a new venture?

What if we lived in world where the goal of national governments, economies and business was to promote the whole person flourishing of each human being? What if our economic system strives to protect community and ecological well-being rather than merely maximize shareholder returns? Join us for a discussion on what it is to be human, and what are our relationship and connection is with fellow humans, non-human life, and our ecology.

Saturday:International Day at Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Monterey

You may know that the US Navy has been offering postgraduate courses to staffers from the military and governmental institutions of over thirty countries at the Naval Postgraduate School for several decades. Every year, they and their families host an International Day, a festival celebrating the unique people, food and culture of their respectives countries. It will be enjoyable for the whole family, with lots of delicious food, information and fun performances. We highly encourage all of you to attend - carpool if you can to Monterey, CA.

Invitation by the OSU to Sunday Tea for Singaporean business owners/entrepreneurs (23 Apr 2017)

We have a rich, vibrant and growing pool of Singaporean business owners here in the San Francisco Bay Area. It goes without saying that Silicon Valley births many tech start-ups, but you’d be surprised that we also have Singaporeans among us who aren’t in the pure tech space. Some own cafes/restaurants or businesses centred on food, some work professionally with lenses (both in front of and behind), a couple run legal practices, one owns and operates a commercial farm, some are more artistic and others altruistic. And there are many more businesses owned by Singaporeans here that we don’t know about!

Time to bring Singaporean business owners and entrepreneurs together for tea! There is incredible value in Singaporeans businessowners/entrepreneurs from across industries/sectors coming together to discuss the potential and capacities such a collective might bring to not just yourselves and your businesses, but the Singaporean community here, as well as fellow Singaporeans with aspirations of setting up business here in Silicon Valley.

The afternoon tea event organised by the Overseas Singaporean Unit (OSU) will be held at Singaporean-operated café, Drip Line Coffee. The menu is designed by Singaporean chef Nora Haron and will feature Singaporean flavours with Californian produce.

This event is strictly for Singaporean business owners/entrepreneurs in the SF Bay Area. If you’re a Singaporean business owners, don’t miss this get-together and RSVP early to avoid disappointment.

To RSVP, please email the following information to stanley_leong@mccy.gov.sg: - Name- Cellphone Number- Name of Business- Business Website Address- Designation- Industry- Years in Operation- City that your business is based In

Thinking of something special for Mother's Day? Wood Flower Cottage in Siglap Rd has a catalogue of fresh and sweet items to surprise your Mom with. They also have a 10% discount for SingaporeConnect members with code SINGSOC. Check http://singaporeconnect.org/pages/promo for details.

SEA Connect

Like to network and meet up plus soak in the wisdom from a panelists of tech professionals? Monk's Hill Ventures is holding an event in San Francisco. Check http://singaporeconnect.org/item/1114072 for details.

Join us as we plan our next big event

SingaporeConnect and OSU are working together to kick up this summer with a sporty event for the community. Join us to discuss how and what we can make everyone come together for some exciting activities! Email singaporeconnect@gmail.com to let us know and we'll invite you to a planning meeting.

Apprentice @ CAAMFest

Hope you enjoyed the Singapore film, Apprentice, shown at CAAMFest! Here's a thank you acknowledgment from CAAM:

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Thank you for helping us promote CAAMFest35 screenings and events to your networks and audiences. Our collaborations with organizations like Singapore Connect help make our festival a success. We greatly appreciate your partnership!

On Feb 12, 2017, SingaporeConnect held our largest ever Lunar New Year banquet, with a Lion Dance, several games and performances, and thanks to our sponsors, a very generous lucky draw. With many of you there we celebrated! Enjoy these photos and videos and relive the joyous event!

Curious where everyone's coming from? This map shows the approximate location of registrants, clumped by area.

So clearly, if you're in the North Bay, it's probably a stretch to come down to San Jose and we understand.
We like to highlight an option for you on Jan 27, just a week from now:

The Berkeley Singapore Students' Association is having a Chinese New Year's Celebration at the Great China Restaurant, 2190 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94704. They still have spots available, which you are free to register (as a non-member) for. Here's the link:

We're helping promote this event by the National University of Singapore Entrepreneurs' Association (NUSEA):
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The NUS Entrepreneurs’ Association (NUSEA) brings you a series of growth dialogues that can be used as a secret weapon to build your next thriving business.

What is it like to boostrap a company to $1M in revenue in high school? Join NUSEA in a conversation with Jesse Leimgruber - Stanford-dropout, Thiel Fellow, and CEO of digital marketing tools company NeoReach.

Jesse started NeoReach as a freshman at Stanford; the company has since raised $3.5 million in funding, made $1M in revenue last year, and every one of Jesse's 22 employees are older than himself.

NeoReach provides influencer intelligence to help companies search, analyze, and leverage the power of the social graph. Some of its prominent customers include NBC, Walmart, Honda, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Free food and drinks will be provided for the early birds. Register ASAP at: https://nuseapresents4.eventbrite.sg/ to reserve your seat! We look forward to seeing you there. :)
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Promo

As a benefit to being a SingaporeConnect member, we can connect you to companies and organisations who may have services of your interest. By identifying as a SingaporeConnect member, they may even extend an extra benefit to you for your patronage.

Bak Kwa from honestbee

honestbee is a Singapore-based company with a presence around Asia offering concierge services, which you can use to purchase items from your favourite grocery stores to your friends and family.

Specially for SingaporeConnect members (who are overseas Singaporeans), honestbee has provided this discount codeto use during the Lunar New Year to purchase goodies such as Bak Kwa and more to their loved ones back in Singapore.

There are only 78 seats left, which we would love to fill, so please if you haven't, do consider joining your friends or family, or come and make new ones! The registration page is: http://sgccny2017.eventbrite.com

We are using the Group feature in Eventbrite which lets you specify which group (aka table) you'll like to be in, so you can automatically group yourself with friends, family, or colleagues. This feature is very helpful for us too, and we encourage you to use Eventbrite's interface to add this instead of emailing us directly, especially since we actually can't add you to a group! (yes, Eventbrite support told us we can't, you have to do it).

What we can do is show the groups that have been created:

Group Name

No in Group

More Needed

é£Žç”Ÿæ°´èµ·

10

0

Huat huat huat

9

1

Sahara

7

3

MiAnLaJu

7

3

momo

3

7

North Bay

2

8

Huat Huat Huat 888

6

4

Contact Singapore

4

6

Gian family

4

6

SuperCircle

7

3

Lam-Tan

7

3

88 Black Sheep

9

1

Wong and Lim

6

4

Jaik And Huat Ah!

4

6

NCSV31

1

9

And how many seats left for each group. 86 are in a group, with 36 without. Looks like quite a theme going with Huat!

Yes, but only for Singaporeans and Singapore PR. When registering, select "Enter Promo Code", then use the code, "EarlyBird" to get $5 off any Singaporean and Singapore PR tickets. There are a limited number of codes, so register early before they run out!

Hope the end of the year is bringing much good cheer to all, and for those of you lucky to be heading back to Singapore for the holidays, what joy it is to have a choice of two non-stop flights a day!

SEA Connect 2016

An upcoming panel discussion on Dec 13 for those interested in what's happening in the South East Asian tech and entrepreneurship scene. Held at Block 71, by Monk's Hill, with Singaporean CEO Ong Peng Tsin and with several speakers.

A journalist writing for a Singapore news magazine has inquired us to hear from you. They like to find out why Singaporeans are doing startups in the San Francisco Bay Area. Why did you come here to chase your dreams? If you like to provide your insights, please reply back as soon as possible.
Here's an earlier survey of our members with entrepreneurial interests:

We're planning to hold a dinner celebration on Sunday, Feb 12, 2017. Would you like to get involved in making this celebration a joyous and homely one? Please email back by January. We can include you in a planning meeting too!

To ensure that you continue to receive Contact Singapore’s emails, make sure you click “this is not spam”.

Insights@Home: Infocomm & Media

22 September 2016
Burlingame, US

Hot Tech Jobs in Singapore and Who’s in DemandHear from four industry insiders from various segments who will discuss their take on Singapore’s tech scene and upcoming developments

According to recent reports, technology jobs in cyber security, cloud engineering, data analytics and software development are among the bright sparks in Singapore’s job market and a big contributor is the push for a smart nation.

This rise in demand is in spite of a slower economy, where employers find difficulty in filling technology positions which sometimes go vacant for months.

Recruitment firms indicated that there are tech roles, including application developer, user-interface designer and project manager, which have seen demand go up by 50 percent over the past two years.

Join us at our Insights@Home: Infocomm & Media session to hear from our guest speakers from IBM Research, StarHub, Twitter and EDB as they talk about the tech scene in Singapore, which roles they see high demand hiring, and why you should advance your career back in Singapore.

Contact Singapore Area Director for North America, Ms Kelly Tan, will host this session and present information about relocating home.

For more than seven decades, IBM Research continues to define the future of information technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located across six continents. Scientists from IBM Research have produced six Nobel Laureates, 10 U.S. National Medals of Technology, five U.S. National Medals of Science, six Turing Awards, 19 inductees in the National Academy of Sciences and 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame.

IBM Research has recently set up the first IBM Center for Blockchain Innovation in Singapore to advance industry transformations using Blockchain technologies. This center will work actively with clients across industries such as Finance, Trade, and Commerce to explore how Blockchains can transform as well as create new opportunities for them. The center will create new digital platforms and business networks in support of key industry transformations.

StarHub’s Cyber Security Centre of Excellence (CS-COE) was conceptualized to create a sustainable Cyber Security Ecosystem in Singapore that focuses on 4 key areas, namely Innovation, Partnership, Talent Development and National Cyber Defense. CS-COE will offer a suitable platform to (1) develop novel Telco-centric cyber security solutions that are effective to counter against evolving cyber threats, (2) collaborate with leading companies and Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) to co-create the best-of-breed cyber security solutions, (3) build a pool of talent to create a vibrant Cyber Security Industry and meet the local demand for Cyber Security Professionals and (4) work with agencies and other providers to implement a holistic nationwide cyber defense capability. This is an initiative supported by EDB.

Twitter, Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) is what's happening in the world right now. From breaking news and entertainment to sports and politics, from big events to everyday interests. If it's happening anywhere, it's happening first on Twitter. Twitter is where the full story unfolds with all the live commentary and where live events come to life unlike anywhere else. Twitter is available in more than 40 languages around the world. The service can be accessed at Twitter.com, on a variety of mobile devices and via SMS. For more information, visit about.twitter.com or follow @twitter.

EDB is the lead government agency for planning and executing strategies to enhance Singapore’s position as a global business centre. We dream, design and deliver solutions that create value for investors and companies in Singapore. Our mission is to create for Singapore, sustainable economic growth with vibrant business and good job opportunities.

Contact Singapore is an alliance of the Singapore Economic Development Board and Ministry of Manpower. We engage overseas Singaporeans and global talent to work, invest and live in Singapore.

Contact Singapore actively links Singapore-based employers with professionals to support the growth of our key industries. We work with investors to realise their business and investment interests in Singapore.

For information on working, investing and living in Singapore, please visit www.contactsingapore.sg or contact our worldwide offices.

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